SUCCESFUL JEWISH WOMAN
From tragedy to triumph: The beacon lighter who began her journey under the wheels of
a train
Paralympic athlete Pascale Bercovitch’s path — from the
railroad tracks of a Paris suburb, where she hovered between life
and death after being run over by a train, to Mount Herzl, where
she lit a beacon to mark Israel’s 66th Independence Day — has
been a
study in sheer willpower. The 45-year-old French
immigrant is also an accomplished journalist, author and
documentary filmmaker whose work has taken her all over
Europe and Africa. Her greatest sense of accomplishment,
however, comes from having achieved all this in Israel.
Aged 17, on her way to school she fell under the train she was about to board, losing both of her legs.
Lying alone on the rails in the snow for 47 minutes, Pascale underwent a spiritual near death
experience. During her eight hour rescue, awake and already aware of her new condition, she took the
crucial decision that changed her life forever. She knew nothing could ever stop her again; not a train,
social convention, her family, or fear.
Armed with a solid belief that nothing could stop her Pascale followed her dream of going to Israel. In
the summer of 1985, seven months after having both legs amputated at the thigh, she defied all odds—
as well as skeptical relatives and aliya emissaries and flew alone to this totally new country with only a
suitcase, a wheelchair, 2,000 shekels and about three words of Hebrew. She joined the Israel Defense
Forces as its first paraplegic volunteer and was an instructor in the Sar-El program that brings foreigner
volunteers to Israel for short stints in the IDF.
Her move to Israel was not obvious, for a girl who grew up in a typical French Catholic milieu, not
even aware of her Jewish ancestry —her father is Jewish, her mother is not—until she was 13. And
even then, it was a topic that was not discussed at home.
She was 30 before she learned that part of her family had perished in the Holocaust. During her Army
service she converted to Judaism, something she regarded as a formality.
Although she grew up knowing little about Zionism, Bercovitch is in many respects a born Zionist. She
is a single-minded, no-nonsense idealist who seems driven by the words of a man she had never heard
of during her childhood in a drab working-class suburb of Paris: “If you will it, it is no dream".
Bercovitch is a serial dreamer who doesn’t let anything stop her. Her outlook on life is that it can end
in an instant and therefore one should savor every moment. How one goes about this doesn't really
matter. The day she woke up convinced that journalism was her calling, the new immigrant in a
wheelchair was knocking on doors until, just days later, she had landed a position at a French Jewish
radio station and from there moved on to French television. With the outbreak of the Gulf War in 1991,
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